Tornado survivors look for miracles

Did you hear about the “Welcome to Washington” sign that was found 50 miles away in Streator after last Sunday’s tornado?

I can’t tell you how many times I heard that piece of news on the streets of Washington, Ill., this past week. I might have repeated it myself.

The idea that something of that size could have been carried such a distance and survived just seemed to capture everyone’s imagination, even more so than the mail and photos that flew all the way to Chicago’s suburbs.

At one point, somebody asked Washington Mayor Gary Manier, probably for the hundredth time, if he’d heard about the sign, and he said: “Yes, and tell them I want it back.”

It was with that in mind that I tried Friday to track down the person who found the sign to see if I could help arrange for its return. I thought it would be a symbolic boost.

That’s when I learned that nobody in Streator actually found a Welcome to Washington sign.

What Mike Ferko did find in his yard is a remnant of a blue plastic recycling bin bearing the city of Washington logo.

Ferko’s neighbor took a photo of him holding the logo, which she sent out via Twitter, where it was picked up by a Chicago television station, which caught the attention of folks on Facebook, and by the next morning, everybody in Central Illinois knew that the Welcome to Washington sign had been found in Streator.

Honestly, I’d have much rather recovered the sign than poked a hole in this legend, although upon further review, the mayor says he’s not aware of any such sign even being missing.

I do not offer this story as another cautionary tale about the limitations of social media as a news source. In the storm’s grim aftermath, I find it more amusing than anything.

Heaven knows such a miracle certainly seemed possible from the view on the ground in Washington where some people still haven’t found their cars and from the other artifacts that fell from the sky downstream.

In fact, the recycling bin fragment is plenty remarkable in its own right. It just doesn’t carry quite the same romance as finding the town’s welcome sign.

“That would have been great,” agreed Ferko, who was nevertheless very impressed with his tornado souvenir. “It’s still pretty crazy,” he told me. Agreed. There’s nothing funny about the awful destruction wreaked by the winds of up to 190 miles per hour that tore through my old hometown, but there was a gallows humor evident in the survivors who couldn’t help but feel giddy from the shock of finding themselves still alive.

A week later, that remains the double shocker of this event: the absolute annihilation of everything in the tornado’s path except the people, only one of whom died in Washington. Basements can only begin to explain it. On the first day of the recovery, Manier had noted that Washington is a “faith-based community,” and I would say it seems much more so than the town I left 40 years ago.

Washington has so many large congregations at this point that they’ve actually turned over one of the schools and the auditorium in the town’s new community center for church services on Sundays.

The tornado that sliced through town would have certainly had a higher death toll if the storm had hit any of its churches — or if it had waited another hour. Many residents spoke of being at church when the tornado struck, and returning home to find their houses a pile of splinters.

Instead, the tornado took a path that just happened to thread a needle between at least two large church congregations on its way out of town. Make of it what you will.

When I was growing up there, my mother was a stickler for going to the basement at the first hint of dangerous weather. We’d grab our flashlights or candles and make a game of it.

Remember that in those days the National Weather Service wasn’t nearly as adept at tracking tornados as it is now. Back then, we were more likely to decide when to retreat to the basement based on my mother’s judgment of how the sky looked. We were down there often.

Of course, we never did have a tornado, and as I’ve grown older, I’ve become more complacent about seeking shelter in the path of a storm.

After what I saw this week, I don’t intend to ever make that mistake again.